I visited Laas Geel in Somaliland a few days ago, and, at least to me, the painted caves seemed more interesting than many WHS, let alone many of the tentative sites.

We had this problem way back at the start of the "2014 exercise"!! In fact I started it all with a proposal in MAY 2008 which took us many years to conclude! - https://www.worldheritagesite.org/forums/index.php?action=vthread&forum=6&topic=21#ms g52
Assif said "I would recommend to exclude entries from the tentative lists since they are being considered anyway".
Meltwaterfalls said "I think we should include the Tentative list sites"
And we included both!
Note that, of the 117 sites we eventually considered c59 were not then on a T List (1 or 2 might have joined in the interim!!)
So, clearly there IS an interest in considering potential WHS which are NOT on a T List.
Perhaps the way round now is to divide it into 2 exercises?? i.e
a. The T List entries which are most important/worthwhile to get inscribed - possibly done via a complete T List "ranking". But a simple thumbs up/down will always tend to favour the well known - part of the "fun" is the discussion and "learning" is it not? How do we incorporate that?
b. The "best" not on a T List. Number/rules etc to be determined -but similar to the previous exercise. i.e agree a list and vote on it

You obviously have all the "aspiring" sites from our forum. Off the top of my head a few highlights:
* Salar de Uyuni including Incahuasi. Potentially crossing into Chile for Atacarma part of the desert.
* Vale Sagrado (or each of its components).
* Kanazawa Garden
* Trans Sib
* Plenty more of American NPs
* Lakes of Sweden
* West Coast of Ireland / Ring of Kerry / Aran Islands
* Castles of Scotland / Highlands
* Tonle Lake in Cambodia

I think others will come up with more. Being able to circumvent the "official" list I think needs to be part of the exercise.


I would favor a different approach: Create a new kind of site (Aspiring). In the database these would be normal tentative sites, but we would show them separately. If at all. This way we could keep the same approach for all and have a true, live missing list.

Els would be the judge when to create an entry for an aspiring site. I would also say whoever proposes one needs to write a description and a rationale, justifying the "aspiring" part.

I would tend to disagree. In the end when I voted I still faced the same problem of unknown sites and would favor those I knew about. The key part here will be to provide a description per site including those aspiring one.

Personally I would keep the voting open (live), but try to only publish after the first 20 voters are done, so this has a basis. Voting would count disregarding the "visited" flag, unlike for the WHS.

I would like to highlight another problem with the thumbs up/down method: it would not allow voters to distinguish between sites they find suitable for inscription and top missing ones. For example, I would be in favour of inscribing the SchUM Jewish sites in Germany, as they are an extraordinary testimony to Jewish life in mediaeval Europe and fill a gap, but no way I would put them in my list of 50 top missing sites.

Rating more than a thousand TWHS is bound to raise further difficulties. Most people would just rate the sites from countries they know. How can we convince voters to equally rate sites from Italy and Trinidad Tobago? Even for those who would be willing to vote on all TWHS (and additionally all non-TWHS proposals), how feasible is it to read all of the provided descriptions and pass an educated judgment? Accordingly, I would disprefer this attitude to evaluating just the sites that are actively brought forward by Forum members.

This could also be achieved by having a curated list of candidates. Els could just write a blog post or something and link all sites we deem especially important. Still, people could upvote other sites. For the aspiring ones a curation would be needed anyhow as they need to be created in the site first.


Well, looking at the overall rating we did for sites, the best sites are distinct from the worst sites. So having "endless" votes does not impair the order.

I did read up on the ratings subject a little and binary seems more relevant when personalization is intended. So proposal would be to have two scales.

* Favor inscription y/n. -> Community inscription chances.
* 5* rating. This would also allow comparisons to inscribed sites.

One issue I see is that our normal 5* rating score is build on visited sites only. I would be cautious to mix the two ratings as a consequence.